St. Paddys Day Celebration

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Lowville Festival returns for 3rd season – May 26 – 28, 2017

A festival of all the arts along the legendary Guelph Line…

BURLINGTON, ONTARIO March 15TH, 2017

The Lowville Festival will again be presenting superb artistic experiences for audiences old and young in north Burlington’s majestic Escarpment country May 26th to May 28th. This year we are delighted to be presenting a couple of stellar headline attractions, including legendary Canadian guitarist Liona Boyd and the celebrated Toronto comedy troupe Second City.

The Lowville Festival defines itself as “a festival of all the arts for the artist in all of us”. The ultimate aim is not only to feature all of the performing, visual and literary arts, but also to provide opportunities for attendees to participate in the creative process. To that end, local singers are again invited to join the Lowville Festival Choir, which will appear in the opening concert. And budding visual artists will have an opportunity to participate in demonstrations in Saturday’s Sights and Sounds in the Escarpment, our first collaboration with the Art Gallery of Burlington.

For our third annual festival, we have moved the festival to late May to avoid the torrid heat that we experienced during the past couple of summers, and also to set ourselves aside from the huge number of festivals that take place at that time. In addition to the two venues on the Guelph Line that we have been utilizing since the festival’s inception, Lowville United Church and St. George’s Anglican Parish Hall, we will be presenting both Second City and Motus O in a large tent in scenic Lowville Park.

The 2017 festival will be launched on Friday May 26th with a concert at St. George’s Hall entitled To Canada with Love. Famed Canadian guitarist Liona Boyd will headline a celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday which will also feature her dazzling new duo guitar partner Andrew Dolson. A highlight will be the appearance by the Lowville Festival Choir under the direction of Hamilton-born Wayne Strongman, former conductor of Hamilton’s Bach-Elgar Choir.

Saturday’s daytime activities, Sights and Sounds in the Escarpment, will take place at Lowville United Church, a Victorian jewel located at the south end of the hamlet of Lowville. Attendees will have an opportunity to take in demonstrations from some of Burlington’s finest artists and artisans, and also to make art themselves. During the afternoon they will also be serenaded in the church sanctuary by some of the region’s finest young performers under the direction of acclaimed music director Michael Mulrooney.

The Lowville Festival Tent will play host on Saturday night to Second City. The celebrated sketch/improv company, which gave birth to the legendary SCTV television series, will be presenting a devilishly satirical show entitled Canada, The Thinking Man’s America.

The festival finale will be a presentation of Motus O’s acclaimed production of Alice. A tour de force for the entire family featuring music, dance and theatre, inspired by both Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice will also be presented in the Lowville Festival Tent on Sunday afternoon May 28th.

The Lowville Festival is the vision of an artistic/management team of three. Two are Burlington performing artists: Lorretta Bailey, a Lowville resident, who has performed in musical theatre productions across Canada, including the original Toronto production of Les Miserables; and Robert Missen, proprietor of the Bobolink Agency, one of the country’s pre-eminent artist management companies, who was the 2016 inductee into the Burlington Performing Arts Centre Hall of Fame. They have been joined by Barbara Anderson-Huget, former Arts and Culture Manager for the Town of Gravenhurst and Executive Director of CARFAC Ontario, the association of visual artists, among many other distinguished positions.